Grander Joy of Spirit: "Spirit of Aretha"

"Spirit of Aretha," 4" x 4", egg tempera miniature portrait on Kelmscott vellum, (available from my website) (c) Mona Diane Conner 2009

My portrait of Aretha Franklin is posting on my miniature blog, but it shows the "Mary" in Aretha; it's her shining moment, so it's placed here too.

What this Blog is About: The Divine in Each Person

We are not equal to God’s Divine power, yet we carry it’s seed within each of us. Over time I am developing a series of spiritually-toned portraits of one person, then another, attempting to pin down that seed of the Divine within the individual as it expresses itself uniquely through each of us. If it is true that we are made in God’s image, is there is a way in which we don’t really perceive this in ourselves, or what it fully means about the measure of each person’s life? Yet if all of creation is a reflecting image of the Divine, it must be true that we are more special than we know. It is this missed part---the divine-yet-human part in each of us--- that I attempt to highlight with my series of each person, beginning with my first subject, The Divine in Kimberly.

If we could really see ourselves as God sees us, how would it change us? Would it help us grow closer in our relation to the Divine? Would it heal us? Would it expand and shift our understanding about who we really are? Religion and spirituality are in a sense flip sides of one coin which are only reflected in each of us by how our actual actions pan out in our lives. Kimberly wears a veil in salute to her reverence for the Divine Feminine in several guises--Mary, and living Indian avatar, Amritanandamayi Ma. She is not Mary or Amma, or a portrayal of them in costume, yet she carries them so dear in her heart that the beauty of this expresses out to all with whom she comes into contact.

Once my mother had a dream. In her dream she was trying to walk home, but she felt lost at first because all the houses were beautiful mansions that looked alike. Which one was hers? Each mansion had lit candles in every window. Then seeing these candles, a safe feeling came over her that although she thought she had been lost, every one of these mansions was actually her home.

It's many lives I believe that we live and it's many mansions, both in heaven and on earth, that we are given to explore, and as in my mother's dream, candles are lit in every window of every mansion, calling us home there too. On earth these mansions lie within each of us, each one a realm of its own within a person, an aspect of who we are. It is these mansions we need to explore in order to fully realize our true human potential.

Grander Joy of Spirit

Monday, April 27, 2009

"Spirit of Aretha"

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What this Blog is About: The Divine in Each Person

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